My Brothers Left Me Out Of Mom’s Obituary Because I “Abandoned The Family.” At The Funeral, Eleven Women I’d Never Seen Stood Up One By One And Asked For Me By Name

My mother’s obituary went up on the funeral home’s website on a Wednesday night in October. I read it on my phone at my kitchen table in Whitesburg, Kentucky, with my boots still on, because I had just come down from a house up Cowan Creek and hadn’t found the energy to unlace them.

Dorothy Mae Kessler, 89, of Crooksville, Ohio, went home to the Lord on Monday.

It said she kept the books at Kessler Feed & Seed for twenty-nine years. It said she taught the third-grade Sunday school class at the Methodist church and that nobody in Perry County could touch her sour cream raisin pie. All of that was true.

Then it said: She is survived by her devoted sons, Dale (Sharon) Kessler and Russell (Tina) Kessler, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

I scrolled down. I scrolled back up. I took off my reading glasses and wiped them on my shirt and read it again, the way you check a chart when the numbers can’t be right.

Then I called my brother.

“Dale, there’s a mistake in Mom’s write-up.”

“No, there isn’t.”

The television was on behind him. He didn’t turn it down.

“I’m not in it.”

“Sharon wrote what’s true, Nell. Mom had two kids who stayed. You abandoned this family when you were nineteen years old and you’ve been gone forty-four years. I’m not putting devoted daughter in the paper for people around here to laugh at.”

“I didn’t ask for devoted. I asked for my name.”

“Service is Saturday at eleven. You can come or not. Nobody’s stopping you.”

He hung up. I sat there a while. Then I unlaced my boots, because they still had to come off.

My name is Eleanor Kessler. I’m sixty-three. For forty years I’ve been a visiting nurse in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, and for thirty-eight of those I’ve been a nurse-midwife too. I never married. I’ve got a small house, a Subaru with two hundred and thirty thousand miles on it, and a bad left knee from other people’s porch steps.

Nobody in Crooksville could have told you any of that. I found out that week how sure of that I’d been.

The Wax Paper

I left on a Greyhound out of Zanesville in June of 1982.

Two summers before, our church youth group had gone to Hazard, Kentucky, to patch roofs. One afternoon a nurse in a mud-covered Jeep stopped to ask if any of us could hold a flashlight. I was the one who said yes. I held it for two hours in a dark front room while she took care of an old man nobody else was coming to see, and when I got back in the church van I knew what I was going to do with my life, and I hadn’t told a soul.

The nursing school in Hazard took me on a scholarship when I was nineteen. My father found the letter.

Daddy ran the feed store on Main Street, and it was going under slowly, the way those stores did. I kept the second set of books. He needed me, and I knew it.

“You get on that bus,” he said, “and don’t come back here asking for anything.”

Dale was twenty-three and had just been offered a job at the Anchor Hocking plant in Lancaster, with benefits. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed.

“If she goes, I can’t take that job. You know that, right, Nell? Somebody’s got to stay.”

“Then stay or don’t,” I said. I was nineteen. I said it just like that.

He stayed. He turned down Anchor Hocking and worked that store beside Daddy until the bank closed it in 1991, and then he drove a truck for the county road garage for thirty years. I’ve had a long time to think about how I said that sentence.

The morning I left, my mother was at the kitchen sink with her back to me.

“Mom, I’m going.”

She didn’t turn around. She kept washing a coffee cup that was already clean.

“There’s sandwiches on the table,” she said. “In the wax paper.”

That was all she said. I took the sack and walked to the end of the lane where Mrs. Pyle from church was waiting to drive me to Zanesville.

Somewhere south of Portsmouth I opened the sack. There were two ham sandwiches and, folded in the wax paper, two twenty-dollar bills. I cried, and I’ll tell you why. I thought she was paying me to go.

Who’d You Have This Week

I called home every Sunday at four o’clock for forty-four years.

Daddy never came to the phone. Mom always did. She wasn’t a talker, and I’m not sure she ever once told me she loved me in words, though she was not unusual in that for a woman from Perry County born in 1937. She told me the weather. She told me who had died. And right before we hung up, every single Sunday, she asked the same thing.

“Who’d you have this week?”

I took it for politeness. It was what you asked when you had run out of things. So I’d tell her, the way you’d tell somebody what you made for supper.

“A girl up Line Fork, Mom, Tammy Sexton. Had a boy, nine pounds. We had an ice storm and I walked the last mile.”

“Line Fork. How do you spell that?”

“L-I-N-E, like a clothesline. Why?”

“No reason. Is she resting?”

Sometimes I could hear something scratching on the other end, small and steady. I thought she was doing the crossword.

I told her about Verna Adams’s mother, who took nine nights to die in a back bedroom on Colly Creek in 1991, and how I slept in a kitchen chair so Verna could lie down. I told her about Darlene Fugate’s twins and the low-water bridge. I should not have said as much as I did, and I wouldn’t now. But it was a long way from anywhere, and it was the only thing I had to talk about, and she was the only one who ever asked.

Not once in forty-four years did she say, “That’s good work, Nell.” Not once did she say she was proud. When I told her I’d passed my midwifery boards in Hyden, there was a silence on the line.

“Well,” she said. “Wear a hat. It’s cold down there.”

I wore a hat.

What Dale Could Have Told You

I’m going to be fair to my brothers, because it’s taken me long enough.

Daddy had his stroke in 1996. I came for four days and then went back, because I had three women due. Dale carried him to the bathroom for seven years. When Daddy died in 2003, I got there the night before the funeral and left the morning after. Russ, who is the baby and three years younger than me, stood in the driveway and watched me load the car.

“Must be nice,” he said.

Mom’s kidneys quit in 2020. She went on dialysis, three days a week in Zanesville, forty minutes each way. Dale was sixty-one. He arranged his shifts around it and then he retired early to do it. Sharon did the pills and the laundry. Russ cut the grass and fixed the furnace and complained about it, which is its own kind of love.

I sent a check for two hundred dollars every month. I came at Christmas, and for a week every summer, unless somebody went into labor.

In July of 2022, when the flood came through Letcher County and took out half of what I knew, Mom fell and broke her hip. I couldn’t have gotten out if I’d wanted to, and I had people on roofs. I got to Ohio five weeks later.

Dale met me on the porch with a weed trimmer in his hand. He looked about eighty.

“Thanks for the check,” he said. “Checks don’t mow grass, Nell.”

That is what he could have told you. It’s all true. Those people stayed, and I went, and when he said I’d left them holding it, there was no lie in that. I just thought there was more to it. And I had no way of showing anyone what the more was, because it was all up a hollow in another state.

By the Radiator

I drove up Friday. Five hours, through Pikeville and up 23.

I wore the only black dress I own, which I bought for a patient’s funeral in 2011. I got to the church on Keystone Street at ten o’clock Saturday morning. Hadley & Sons had Mom up front in the blue suit she wore to everything, with a spray of yellow mums on the casket. There was a poster board on an easel with snapshots on it. I looked it over carefully. Dale’s wedding. Russ with a deer. Grandkids on Santa’s lap. Mom and Daddy in front of the store.

I wasn’t on it. Forty-some photographs, and they’d gone to some trouble. In one of them, from 1975 or so, you could see a girl’s elbow.

Sharon met me in the aisle with a folder of programs against her chest. She’s not a cruel woman. She had been up all week, and it showed.

“Nell. We’ve got the family up front, and it’s pretty tight with the grandkids. There’s room in back, by the radiator.”

I looked past her. There was room in the second pew. I could see it from where I stood.

Dale was up there in a brown suit that didn’t fit anymore. He turned his head and looked at me for about as long as you’d look at a stranger’s car, and then he turned back.

“That’s fine,” I said. I took a program. It said the same thing the website said.

I walked to the last pew and sat at the end by the radiator. It ticked. An old fellow I didn’t know leaned across.

“You a friend of Dorothy’s?”

“I knew her,” I said.

The Van

It was ten minutes to eleven when I heard the van.

You don’t work forty years on bad roads without knowing the sound of a tired Ford engine. I looked out the side window and saw a long white church van pull in crooked across two spaces, and behind it a Chevy Malibu and a pickup truck. The van’s side said, in faded letters, the name of a Freewill Baptist church. The plates were Kentucky.

I thought, Somebody’s got the wrong funeral.

The doors of the sanctuary opened behind me and women started coming in. Older women, mostly, some of them very old, one on a walker and one on the arm of a heavyset woman about forty. They wore church dresses and good coats that had been put away with mothballs, and I could smell them. They didn’t stop to sign the book. They filed past me, up the side aisle, without looking at me at all, and they took the two empty pews on the right side, about halfway up. I counted without meaning to. I always count. Eleven.

I studied the backs of their heads. Then, when they turned to get settled, I studied their faces. I did not know one of them. I would have sworn it on a Bible.

Up front, Sharon leaned over and whispered to Dale. Dale looked around, frowning. Russ looked too.

Our pastor was a young woman named Amy, new that year, who had only known Mom on dialysis. She did the Twenty-third Psalm. The organist did In the Garden. Amy said some nice things about the raisin pie. Then she closed her folder and smiled.

“Dorothy’s family has asked that we keep this simple. But if anyone would like to share a brief remembrance, please feel free to stand.”

There’s always a long quiet after that. Somebody coughed. Wanda Pyle, who is eighty-eight and was Mom’s oldest friend, sat with her purse on her knees and a big plastic Kroger bag at her feet, and she didn’t move.

Over on the right side, the walker scraped.

One by One

It took her some time to get up. She was a tiny old woman in a lavender coat, and the heavyset woman held her elbow. When she spoke, I heard Letcher County in it, so plain that the hair came up on my arms.

“My name is Verna Adams. I come from Colly Creek, Kentucky. I never in my life laid eyes on Mrs. Kessler till I walked in here and seen her in that casket.”

Nobody in the church moved.

“I’m eighty-one years old and I rode five hours. I come to ask something. Is her daughter here? Is Nell Kessler in this church?”

I saw Dale’s shoulders go stiff.

Pastor Amy looked down at her program, then over at my brothers. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

Verna Adams wasn’t finished. “Nine nights that girl slept in a chair in my kitchen, when my mommy was dying in 1991. I hadn’t laid down in a week. I never knew how to thank her, and I reckon I never did. Then that Christmas I got a card in the mail, from Ohio. From a woman I never heard of.”

She reached into the lavender coat and took out a card gone soft at the corners. She held it way out in front of her and read it in the slow way people read aloud who didn’t get much school.

“‘Dear Mrs. Adams. You do not know me. My daughter Nell sat up with your mother. I am sorry for your loss. I wanted you to know that I know what she did. Yours truly, Dorothy Kessler.'”

She lowered the card. “She wrote me every Christmas for thirty-five years. I’d like to see that girl if she’s here.”

She stayed standing. The woman next to her stood up.

“I’m Tammy Sexton. Line Fork. My boy was born in an ice storm in 1989, and Nell Kessler walked the last mile. He’s a lineman in Lexington now. Every February, on his birthday, till he turned eighteen, your mother sent a card with a dollar in it. My daughter delivered your baby. I hope he is a good boy. I’d like to know where Nell’s at.”

I couldn’t feel my hands.

“Darlene Fugate. Twins, 1993. She drove us over a bridge that had water on it. Is she here?”

“Joyce Combs. She sat with my husband so I could go to my boy’s graduation. Your mama sent me a sympathy card before my own sister did. I’m asking for Nell.”

They kept getting up. I had caught these women’s babies. I had held their heads and their mothers’ hands. I had known every one of them, and I had never seen a single one of them. Not like this. I’d seen them at three in the morning with their hair stuck to their faces, thirty years younger, in nightgowns, by a bad lamp. I had never in my life seen them in a good coat.

Five. Six. A pair of sisters from Blackey. Eight.

The heavyset woman holding Verna’s elbow was nine. She stood with her chin up.

“My name’s Brandy Collier. I don’t have a story. I was the baby. My mother passed in 2015, and when we cleaned out her dresser, there were twenty-six cards in it. So when Miss Verna called, I got in the van.”

Ten was a retired schoolteacher from Neon. Eleven was a thin, gray woman by the aisle who only said her name was Opal, and that Nell Kessler knew what for. I did.

All eleven stood there in two pews, in their coats, looking around the church. The radiator ticked beside me.

I don’t remember deciding anything. I remember my bad knee. I remember putting my hand on the pew in front of me and getting up.

“I’m here,” I said. It didn’t come out loud. It didn’t need to. Verna Adams turned all the way around on her walker and looked down that long aisle.

“Well, there you are,” she said. “What are they doing with you back there?”

The Kroger Bag

Wanda Pyle got up then. She picked up the plastic bag and walked to the front, slowly, and took out a Naturalizer shoebox held together with two rubber bands. She set it on the casket next to the mums, as easy as setting a dish on a table.

“Dale Kessler, don’t look at me like that. I’ve known you since you wore diapers,” she said. “Your mother gave me this the day she started dialysis and told me to keep it out of the house.”

She took off the rubber bands. It was packed tight, on edge, like a file drawer. Hundreds of envelopes, with return addresses in shaky pencil and ballpoint from Hindman and Viper and Hallie and Jeremiah. On top lay a green steno pad, and she opened it and turned it around so the front pews could see. It was my mother’s bookkeeper handwriting, column after column. Names. Hollows. Dates. Tammy Sexton, Line Fork, boy, 9 lb. Verna Adams, Colly Crk, mother.

That was the scratching on the phone. That was forty-four years of Sundays.

“Three hundred and some names,” Wanda said. “She’d get off the phone and write it down, and then she’d come to my house to do the envelopes so Wendell wouldn’t see. After he passed, I guess she just liked my kitchen. She bought the stamps out of the egg money, and then the grocery money. She told me when she went, I was to call Verna Adams, and Verna would call the others.”

Wanda looked down the aisle at me then.

“She said, ‘Tell them they don’t need to come for me. They can come for Nell.'”

I heard somebody make a sound, and I think it was me.

“I asked her a hundred times why she didn’t just tell you,” Wanda said. “You know what she said? She said, ‘That girl would have to come home to hear it. And I’ve got a husband and two boys in this house that she left. I can’t say it in this house.’ So she said it to them instead.”

Nobody seemed to know what came next. Pastor Amy had her hand over her mouth. Russ got up, red in the face, and walked out the side door, and I heard it bang.

Verna Adams, still standing, said, “Somebody go get that girl.”

And Brandy Collier, who I caught in my two hands on a Tuesday in 1988, came down the aisle in her good coat and took me by the arm, and she walked me up to the second pew on the left. She looked at Sharon. Sharon moved her purse.

The Furnace Room

The funeral lunch was in the church basement. Ham salad, Jell-O, the same as anywhere. The Kentucky women had brought three pies and a sheet cake in the van, because you don’t go to a funeral empty-handed. They took turns telling me what I’d done, and I’d forgotten a good half of it.

I went looking for Dale about two o’clock. I found him down the back hall in the furnace room, sitting on an upside-down paint bucket in his brown suit, with his tie pulled loose. He’d brought the shoebox with him. It was on his knees with the lid on.

I shut the door behind me and stood there. Neither of us said anything for some time.

“I drove her nine hundred and some times,” he said.

“I know you did.”

“Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Six years. She sat right there beside me in that truck for forty minutes each way, Nell. Do you know how many hours that is? I used to try and get her talking. You know what she’d say to me?” He wiped his face with his whole hand, the way Daddy used to. “She’d say, ‘Watch your speed.'”

“Dale.”

“I turned down Anchor Hocking. I was twenty-three.” His voice had gone high and thin, and it didn’t sound like anybody I knew. “I carried Dad. I did every damn thing. And she goes to Wanda’s with her stamps.” He put his big, cracked hand flat on the lid of the box. “Three hundred names. I went through that whole pad just now, looking. I don’t know what I thought.”

He looked up at me. He was sixty-seven years old, and he looked just like he did in the doorway that morning in 1982.

“Nobody’s ever going to drive five hours for me.”

I have sat with a great many people in the worst hour they ever had. I know when not to say anything. I got another paint bucket from the corner and turned it over and sat down next to my brother, with my bad knee out straight. We could hear the furnace, and people laughing over the pies upstairs.

After a while he took my hand. Neither of us looked at it.

“I shouldn’t have left you off,” he said.

“No.”

“You shouldn’t have said ‘stay or don’t.'”

“No,” I said. “I shouldn’t have.”

Corrections

Dale went to the Tribune office himself that Monday, in his work clothes, and paid thirty-one dollars. It ran on Thursday, down low on page four, under the school lunch menus. A correction to the obituary of Dorothy Mae Kessler: She is also survived by her daughter, Eleanor Kessler, R.N., of Whitesburg, Ky.

Sharon cut it out and mailed it to me without a note, and then a week later she called and we talked for an hour about Mom’s pills.

Russ didn’t call. Russ still hasn’t. I send him a Christmas card, and I don’t expect anything back, and that’s how it ought to be for now. He cut that grass for six years.

Dale kept the Kentucky women’s envelopes for a week and then drove the shoebox down to Whitesburg himself, five hours, with a thermos. He had never once been to my house. He stood in my kitchen with his cap in his hand and looked at the rubber boots by my door and the road maps on the wall.

“So this is it,” he said.

“This is it.”

“It’s kind of small.”

“Yes, it is.”

He stayed for supper and left before dark because he doesn’t like driving Pine Mountain at night.

Sunday at Four

The first Sunday after, four o’clock came around and I picked up the phone before I remembered.

I sat at the kitchen table a good long time. The shoebox was there, and the green pad. The last entry was from September, in a hand that had gone wobbly, and it was the name of a girl from Cumberland whose baby I’d told Mom about on the phone three weeks before she died.

At the back of the pantry I found a box of plain cards I keep for sending to families. I got out a pen. Then I opened the pad to the first page and copied out an address on Colly Creek.

Dear Mrs. Adams, I wrote. My brother Dale Kessler drove our mother to dialysis nine hundred and thirty-six times. I did the arithmetic. He turned down a good job when he was twenty-three so I could get on a bus. I wanted you to know that I know what he did. Yours truly, Nell.

I did three that first Sunday. I told them they needn’t do anything about it. But I know those women. I’ve known them a long time.

Dale called me the second week of December.

“Nell, what in the hell. I got a Christmas card from some woman in Letcher County, and she says she’s praying for my back.”

“Is that right?”

“There’s a fruitcake. Who sends a fruitcake?”

“Watch your speed, Dale,” I said, and he laughed, a rusty sound, and then he got quiet on the line and told me about the weather.

I went up for Easter. I took the back way into Crooksville and parked in his gravel drive. Sharon had a ham in the oven. I went to the kitchen to wash my hands, and I reached up to set my glasses on top of the refrigerator, where I’ve always set them in that house.

There was a Red Wing boot box up there, an old one, the orange gone pale.

The lid was off, and leaning against the wall behind it. Inside were nineteen envelopes, all standing on edge, like a file drawer. Somebody had squared them up.

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